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Most writing happened on Medium after November 2014 across various company publications, with the medium.bmannconsulting.com subdomain being the one where permanent posts end up. I should probably get around to getting a Medium download so I have them.

This blog is now powered by Jekyll 3 hosted on Netlify. Netlify builds the site from git.

I write on my phone or my Chromebook. On the Chromebook, Caret is a text / coding editor I use. The Netlify CMS lets me edit in a browser.

tldr; the Netlify CMS doesn’t support drafts on Gitlab, so put things back on Github.

Also moved to Michael Rose’s Minimal Mistakes theme. Fighting with nokogiri on the Chromebook means no emoji. This meant posts have a slightly different default layout again: sed -i 's/layout: posts/layout: single/' *.md.

Previous Editions

Jekyll 3 on Netlify (Gitlab)

June 2018 - August 2018

To upgrade, I did some yak shaving.

I created a new Gitlab borismann and imported from Bitbucket. I connected Netlify to it, but it failed to build. Digging in, I created a new branch 2018-reboot and deleted the Gemfile.lock, and edited Gemfile to use Jekyll 3, a newer Ruby, and nuked the rack stuff. bundle install got things going.

There is some nonsense with the file watching not working, so bundle exec jekyll serve --no-watch was needed.

The default post type is now “posts”, which meant replacing across all files using sed: sed -i 's/layout post/layout: posts/' *.md.

The comments are powered by Disqus. All comments are welcome, although I reserve the right to tell you to go post your thoughts in your own space somewhere.

Tweets to new stories are scheduled using Buffer and published on my @bmann account.

The domain bmannconsulting.com is over a decade old. NameCheap is the domain registrar and DNS host, and is still my recommendation for new domain registrations.

Posts are typically written in Markdown with Byword on a Macbook Air or iPad Mini. Code for the site is edited with Atom.

My writing here tends to be long form (1000+ words) original pieces, aside from aggregation-plus-commentary of embedded Storify content. For example, this piece on the Microsoft Surface launch. The content is also rarely personal, mainly focusing on tech-related subjects.

For both sites, the entire source was / is in my own Dropbox account, so that I could create drafts and edits on any machine. This site was also in a private git repo on Bitbucket. I still needed to have the entire Ruby / Octopress build chain available on some machine to create new entries.

Posterous

January 2010 - April 2012

I split off my blog into it’s own subdomain. I selected Posterous because I liked built-in comments, and in general it felt more suited to long form writing than Tumblr did. Being able to cross-post back to my main Drupal site so that I would have a copy of the content was also great.

Drupal (various versions 3.x - 6.x)

November 2002 - April 2012

For the last period, the site was hosted on Omega8, which specializes in managed Drupal hosting on top of the Aegir mass hosting system. The actual database / content stretched back many versions of Drupal, through a variety of content re-organization and hosting changes.

Comments from this period are currently offline.

HTML, Pmachine, & Early Experiments

December 2001 - 2003

Bits and pieces of static HTML and various PHP scripts, including Pmachine as a personal blog that ran concurrrently with installs of PHPNuke and later my Drupal site.